Tragic Modernities

‘What Festivals of Atonement, What Sacred Games We have to Invent’ (Friedrich Nietzsche): Modernist Tragedy after the Death of God

“…9 However, as Miriam Leonard claims, 'The philosophy of the tragic did not represent a departure from aesthetics and a refuge in metaphysics'; rather it proposed 'the elevation of aesthetics to a new position within philosophy'. 10 Tragedy, in this reading, is seen as adding an aestheticizing impulse to philosophy, one that is further highlighted within modernism by the introduction of a performance imperative.…”

Tragedy, genealogy and theories of International Relations

“…In so doing, tragedy also produced certain power-effects: it did not simply represent the values of statehood and sovereignty, but also contributed to their enactment, acceptance and naturalisation; to the drawing of what Foucault (2009: 265) describes as a ‘tragic horizon of politics and history’. This association between tragedy and what it means to ‘do’ politics or to ‘be’ a political subject can be seen to have endured, and indeed to have contributed towards the construction of contemporary Western political imaginaries: as Miriam Leonard (2015: 13) argues, ‘the question of tragedy [has] become linked to the self-definition of modernity’. According to Leonard (2015: 13), tragedy has helped to circumscribe, delimit and define what we think of as the political field: ‘tragedy and modern political theory have shaped each other’s discourses and have provided mutually reinforcing ways of understanding the predicament of modernity’ (cf.…”

“…The limits of tragedy, according to this reading, have helped to define the very limits of modern Western political thought, and the genre thereby plays an important, even constitutive role in the contemporary political imagination. One of the results of this mutual influence, for Leonard (2015: 3), is the pervasive sense that ‘to be a modern subject, whether in our experience of gender, in our attitude to the past, or in our sense of political agency, is to be a tragic subject’. This appeal to the tragedy of political subjectivity is reflected in the three theories of IR already discussed, as well as in a large body of literature in other fields (e.g.…”

“…His desire to move beyond the totalising linguistic and conceptual apparatuses he diagnoses as endemic to ‘the modern’ provides a number of similarly valuable insights into the operations and effects of contemporary political discourse. Yet if tragedy is to be considered as having had a historically constitutive role within contemporary political imaginaries (Foucault, 2003, 2009; Leonard, 2015), then it seems reasonable to argue that the genre might be a poor tool for the transformation and ‘revivication’ of that political vocabulary and imagination of which it is already a significant part. While Dillon’s (1996: 140–141) return to Greek tragedy is an attempt to bypass altogether what he perceives as the ‘dereliction’ of the modern political imagination, an awareness of tragedy’s role in the construction of this imagination suggests that this attempt is likely to be self-defeating.…”

“…Even Greek tragedy cannot now be read without acknowledging and engaging with the modern readings that have constituted contemporary understandings of human or political limits and possibilities: how can one read Antigone or Oedipus Rex without engaging, willingly or otherwise, with Hegel or Freud (cf. Leonard, 2015: 5)? While Dillon (1996: 140–141) sees the irretrievable (pre-Christian, Greek) otherness of tragedy as the primary obstacle to its use in contemporary political thought, a genealogical reading suggests that tragedy might also be woven into the modern, Western political understanding in complex and heterogeneous ways.…”